1. Field of the Invention
This invention pertains to computerized information management and processing systems generally, and more particularly to integrating business data from source and destination data sets.
2. Description of the Related Art
Often different data sets contain business data describing the same operations and/or entities but are not under the control of a single business enterprise. Rather than duplicate data collection and maintenance, sometimes it is more useful for an enterprise to obtain business data from an external data set and use it to update an internal data set, or vice versa. Some adapter software has been developed, but this adapter software is typically tailored for a particular source and destination data set and is not generally useful for finding a common data representation between other data sets.
Even when adapter software can take as input a mapping from a source data set to a destination data set and use the mapping to update the destination data set, such adapter software typically is very resource intensive. For example, updates to the destination data set are often performed one at a time, on a record-by-record basis for the various tables in the data sets. Furthermore, these updates usually do not take advantage of relationships between tables to optimize the updating process.
What is needed is an adapter that can operate for various forms of source and destination data sets. The adapter should optimize the updating process to combine operations on a data set to increase efficiency of the updating process.